


Because Of Course It Had To Be Russia

by Fangirl_Goon_Squad



Category: Captain America (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU-Civil War Never Happened Here, AU-Post-Avengers, Adventures In The Taiga, Angry Loners, Attempted Humor Here And There, Broken Relics, Casually Murderous Temperaments, Feels Of Assorted Types, Fractured family, Heavy Emotional Junk, Loki the Exile, M/M, Seriously A Lot Of F-Bombs, Slow Burn, TW-Discussion Of Assisted Suicide, TW-Suicide-Ideation Only, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, These Jerks Are NOT Politically Correct, Weirdos In The Woods, WinterFrost - Freeform, what self-esteem
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-24 15:08:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 15,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10744185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fangirl_Goon_Squad/pseuds/Fangirl_Goon_Squad
Summary: This is the story of an unlikely pair, with more in common than they would ever have thought, meeting in an unlikely fashion in one of the worst places in the world for either one to end up stuck, how they managed to keep from killing one another, and what became of that self-restraint.The taiga, for anyone unfamiliar with the word, is the vast, largely coniferous forest that occupies a HUGE part of central and eastern Russia, including parts of Siberia.  It's a harsh place, but also a great way to vanish if you have the skills and motivation.





	1. Because You Were Careless

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone else ever butcher a favorite OTP just to see if you can MAKE yourself write it that way? 
> 
> I've had some practice on non-fandom creative writing characters over the years when I took a non-fandom, unpublished OTP I'd been writing on since the late 80s and fractured them in a way that wound me up with like 6 alternate storylines, so I thought I'd turn that question on my personal favorite fandom OTP. On an average day I'm all about Steve & Bucky in case my bookmark list wasn't obvious about that ;). 
> 
> This is where my brain went when I asked it 'what if you replaced one of them with another favorite character in a really, really weird situation?'. A lot of my writing seeds sprout from my brain coughing up a single image that I find intriguing enough to run with it from there, and this one started with the breaking & entering to tell me which character was rotating in and where the story would take place. (Yeah, there are some really entertaining things wrong in my brain on an average day...)
> 
> Recommended listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6dsffOrOoI and if you don't know who Jeff Beck is as a guitarist that's fine, but if you listen to this—I recommend a system with awesome bass—keep in mind HE IS 72 YEARS OLD. I'll be happy to discuss other inspirational listening choices in comments, but I don't have any online playlists to link so if you wanna talk tunes we'll have to do it the 'author has no money and is a friggin' dinosaur' way.
> 
> Recommended watching: If you can stand Werner Herzog documentaries and want to know more about life in the taiga, watch Happy People.
> 
> In case this one, like the last, decides to 'forget' the total number of chapters in the work, that number is 17. Most are fairly short.

If only he could forget that awful day when the father who was not his father admitted that horrifying truth, told him of his hidden, sickening true heritage, of all the secrets and deceit that had turned him to a living icon of treachery and chaos. If **only** his skills or magics could turn that way, slip him free of the pain left by the lies or the memories, but nothing had worked.

He had tried _everything_. Lashing out, sullen silence, honest treachery, manic wickedness, trickery of bone-rattling intensity, all the way up to trying to take for his own a place in which he had no right to power...it had all failed. Manipulating those he loved had only ended in more hurt both dealt and taken. A week-long drunken spree rarely equaled in history or legend didn't blunt the pain, but pulled more in its wake when he finally sobered up. So, so many familiar eyes looked away as if shamed by his very presence when he was finally deemed capable and presentable to be brought before judgment. There were so, so many reasons, justifications, excuses, crimes, whatever one might choose to call his actions, but older thoughts and memories kept crowding out the leaden terms of his disgrace.

When his punishment was detailed, he very nearly spat in that once-beloved face, but not for the reasons family and former friends ( _Curse you all with your fair-weather smiles and eyes so treacherous you cannot lay them on me now, cannot see me now!_ ) might have expected.

Stripped of all power, all rank, all ties, all welcome in the only home he'd ever known, and banished to mortality and vulnerability. What a surprise. At least the old man was consistent. But the fresh rage stayed with him; that hadn't been taken, of course not. The cruelest part of him loved that he could mock them silently even in his disgrace, knowing they had no idea what he was really, honestly angry over, what had unerringly scarred a crucial part of his heart shut to anything good. He wasn't even truly enraged about banishment to a place where his life would be short and harsh, where no glamour could protect him from the fact that being recognized might well be enough to get his throat cut, that he was exiled to a place where he would have to live with those truths and risks for as long as he could manage without a single living being to draw on for help or support or even use as a scapegoat.

_Because you were **careless** with your favorite stolen relic, and now I'm so broken by your hand that you can't even send me to die among my own kind as you yourself told me was my true fate_ , he thought bitterly as the familiar blazing light and flaring colors took him for the last time.


	2. Just Too F-ing Much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "How I met that maniac." (could be from either point of view)

“...And **why**?” the tall, lean man was muttering through bared teeth as he casually picked the lock of a modest home that hadn't shown a sign of human life in or around it for the last three days and nights of careful scrutiny. It was a fair walk from anything resembling the outskirts of the nearest town, and isolation still held more appeal than freezing to death. Somehow. “Because _of course_ it had to be **fucking** Russia in the middle of **fucking** winter,” he hissed in a frustrated tone even as the door came open. He was inside and shutting the door behind him in a single sinuous motion, just a wisp of shadow slipping from one dark place to another so swift and clean that the plume of his breath could not keep up. It wasn't much warmer indoors, true, but at least that _wind_ was off his newly sensitive skin for a while.

Cackling ever so softly, he took in the boring walls, plain furniture, and small room dimensions.

“Perfect,” he mumbled with the sharp tang of bitterness in his tone, rolling his leaf-green eyes. “Yes, this _is_ possibly the last gilded hovel on any world that I could survive on where anyone would think to find me. Speaking of survival...” Trailing off, he wandered on light feet, quieter for all his size than virtually anyone had ever expected so long as he kept his mouth shut, until he found the kitchen. It was a faint hope, the off chance that maybe someone had stowed non-perishable food in a pantry in case of future tenants, but it was worth a check.

The moment he stepped all the way over the kitchen threshold, his plan went straight to Hell.

He heard the dry clicking of the safety releasing at the same time as he felt what could only be the muzzle of a gun slide into the glossy black fall of hair behind his ear. An unfamiliar voice snarled an unfamiliar word, a command by the tone.

“Sorry, my...friend. I don't speak Russian. It's one of several reasons I don't enjoy _being_ here. In Russia.”

“I said,” the stranger tried again in rusty, harshly accented English, “ **freeze**.”

It was the last straw, just too fucking much, he was a fucking _Jotun_ or at least had been and it was a deep-freeze straight out of **legend** out there or he'd never have bothered fucking breaking in to begin with... _There really is a strange comfort in Midgardian foul language,_ Loki thought even as he collapsed into a helplessly giggling heap before passing out from hunger and stress, slumped against the cabinetry at his captor's booted feet.


	3. Duly Noted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long chapter this time, in which two-sided conversation finally occurs and an understanding or three is reached.

When he woke, he was immediately alert mostly because he could think of no reason why he was still alive, much less unbound and laid out on a decrepit couch so small that for a pillow to stay under his head meant that the far arm was just below his knees, leaving his shins and feet to hang. He thought about getting up, decided it was probably a bad plan, and finally opened his eyes.

Yep, that would've been a bad plan, and given that this asshole had managed to surprise him once already by startling him, even accidentally, it could very well have ended up being Loki's last bad plan in such a **long** line of poor choices and decisions. The stranger was hunched in a chair nearby with his feet drawn up onto the seat, so still that only the glint of moonlight off his light eyes gave him away for alive, much less awake. A moment of study turned Loki's stalwart belly to ice, but he kept his face still with the practice that had come from centuries of assorted lies and tricks. The other man's basic description was ordinary enough—dark hair almost to his shoulders, eyes just a bit more blue than grey, strong jawline, heavy muscle obvious even under several layers of winter wear, probably an honest six feet standing. Loki had seen some very secret documents, though, and more than one pilfered memory back when the magic that let him just rifle through and take what he wanted still ran in his blood, and he knew those impassive features from photos about someone largely believed to be a myth among the few to even hear of him.

He knew exactly whose house he'd broken into, now, or at least he was pretty sure. Maybe he was the only one in this misbegotten Realm still drawing breath who would know this monster on sight other than a handful of Americans, but just the suspicion, no matter how strong, was enough to make him very, very cautious. If he was as right as he felt, _this_ was terror incarnate for a lot of natives to this Realm who were fairly frightening on their own.

Luckily for Loki, the spider had been so **very** close to her gallant archer, who had a very good memory for many of their highly classified conversations—more than one of which had involved that infernal woman learning most of her frozen detachment and half her fighting style from a very rare instructor indeed...one who later put a bullet through her to kill someone else without recognizing his former student or caring. The same former instructor who had put _three_ bullets through that bilgesnipe Fury shortly before shooting the woman again, and again without knowing her.

“I would say good morning, but with the moon up perhaps it should be good evening.” The other man didn't answer, but somehow managed to get even more tense and alert when Loki swung his legs around and sat up, taking a moment to let his suddenly swimming head clear. “If you don't plan to kill me, is there any chance you'll let me have a crack at the kitchen? I haven't eaten in so long I don't remember the last thing I didn't have to kill myself for a meal, and I barely remember what that last rabbit I did kill tasted like.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Trying not to freeze to death.”

“Why this house?”

“Because, soldier,” and there was finally a reaction, though hostility wasn't what he'd been hoping for, “It's a good distance from any neighbors and I watched for three days and nights and somehow saw no sign of you or anyone else. I'd _love_ to know how you managed that.”

“I know when I'm being watched. And don't call me 'soldier'. That's not who or what I am any more.”

“A feeling I know well. I am no longer who anyone might think.”

“I'm pretty sure you answer to Loki. If not you're a dead ringer for some kind of supposedly inter-dimensional asshole who tried to rip apart the city I grew up in before I was ever anybody's soldier.”

“Well, yes, but a name is only a label, not an identity entire. Although you're right. On both counts, what I am called and what I did. And I'm pretty sure if I use any of the names I believe to be yours it'll be the last word I say, courtesy of any number of possibilities among the knife collection you're wearing.”

“You're smarter than you look. Why are you in Russia if you don't like it?”

“Because it's where I was dumped without money, transport, documentation, appropriate clothing or any survival gear. It's taken me a week just to wander into this place from where I started.”

“You're the god of what, fire, trickery, deceit, lies, and chaos?” Loki hung his head with a rueful snort.

“Was. I **was** a god. Now I am banished, stripped of power, home, family, and future. Only a man to bleed as red as you, maybe not quite like any other but still a man, not a god.”

“So you didn't come here hunting me?”

“Nope,” Loki sighed. “I honestly did not think anyone was using this building. I don't mind having this little chat, but if you want it to keep on you'd better find something I can eat. My vision's going grey at the edges and I really don't want to pass out again.” _Because, among other reasons, I've got this hunch that if I wake up at all it will be alone, and you are perhaps the only man on Midgard who might let me live if my silver tongue is still working..._

“Fine.” He got up, revealing a frame nearly the size of Loki's own but broader, thick and heavy with hard muscle. Size notwithstanding, he moved gracefully—but he didn't quite pull that errant left sleeve down fast enough, letting a hint of white metal flash through that confirmed his identity. When he came back from the kitchen, it was with a bowl that had something potato-based piled pretty deep in it. Shortly, the bowl gleamed empty.

“Thank you...,” Loki started, pausing when those blue eyes went narrow again. “You know, if you don't plan to kill me right off and you don't want to answer to 'soldier', perhaps you could suggest something you don't mind being called?”

“Winter will do for a name. So, back to my question: you aren't hunting me? You're not a scout, or bait?”

“I sincerely doubt anyone else in this Realm even knows I'm here, and if there are hunters on my track they're after me, not you. Getting dumped on my ass here doesn't actually mean I'm welcome, so I'll be laying low myself. I certainly haven't seen evidence of anyone following me for the last week, or even since I got dropped here without so much as a warm coat. I don't really mind the cold, but in my current state it could easily freeze me solid if I get distracted long enough. I broke in hoping for a fireplace and perhaps a meal.”

“Well, you've had the meal.” _Soldat,_ whispered the unwelcome little voice he could not yet escape, _Soldat, you are overdue for a reset. Your mission report is late. Your behavior grows erratic. You were made to end things, not care about them. Not listen to them. Not feed and shelter them. The weapon is malfunctioning, Soldat...The weapon can no longer be trusted and you are the weapon, Soldat..._

“For which you have my thanks, Winter.” When he didn't follow up with intrusive questions, the brawny semi-stranger finally got up and went to the fireplace, where shortly he had a very small fire going. Loki dragged the entire couch close to it, surprising his companion with his strength even half-starved and, if his claims were true, stripped nearly to the bone of a large part of who he'd been. That last, at least, struck a deep, quiet chord.

Winter was extremely surprised, even if his unexpected houseguest couldn't see it yet, to find the newcomer's wiry corded muscle and long frame and easy grace all too familiar...although he kept picturing short blond hair, bigger shoulders, blue eyes instead of green, and a totally different wicked grin, another man who like this unexpected intruder moved like a dancer dropped into a full-on riot unexpectedly but completely prepared to stick it out. Shying from those thoughts, he finally let something slip to where Loki could see it.

“Should I go once my feet are warmed?” Well, _that_ was certainly a first for the other man from what Loki could see, but it made sense, really. Winter was clearly not used to being **asked** much of anything that wasn't actually a command, and given who Loki was quite sure he was dealing with now that wasn't much shock.

“Get some sleep,” Winter growled. “Passing out doesn't rest you up. Just be aware you may very well wake up with a knife in your ribs.”

“I could give you a list as long as my leg of people who'd pay you **fortunes** for proof of my death, so if you want to get paid for it you should wake me up first and get those names. I doubt I'd give you any trouble over it, really. Mind if I sleep on the couch, here? Cold may not bother me, but warmth does feel good.” Once he had been tortured to his breaking point, not all that long since, and a lot of those torments had been in the form of glowing metal. Now that his body behaved only as human, though, the warmth did feel very good.

“I lock the only room I sleep in. Rest of the place is fair game as long as you don't get me caught. I get caught, you get dead.” Wary to the bone and beyond, this one, but Loki's casual approach to every threat out of his mouth remained both unexpected and difficult to assimilate.

“Duly noted, Winter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here you have the first three chapters. It gets weirder from here, complete with some smut and just SO MANY "unladylike words". ;)
> 
> I nearly didn't publish this at all. It took just ONE person commenting on my last piece to shore up an author experienced with writing but not publication. Constructive criticism is just as welcome as any praise, perhaps even more so because of my inexperience with sharing my work; usually I'm the only person who ever reads it and you cannot get a solid worldview from a single point of observation. Please comment if you have anything to say!


	4. Nobody I Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boundaries can be so very, very important. So can secrets, even if keeping them starts to genuinely hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another very short chapter. Chapters seem to be the only writing I can keep short.

“You look like crap.” The brown-haired man who would still answer only to Winter was no better off than the one he growled at first thing on a pale morning.

“You talk when you dream, Winter. Hard to sleep through some nights.”

Loki was surprised when the other man paused for a sigh. “Fuck. Sorry. I say anything interesting for once?”

“Well, as usual half of it was languages I don't speak, but I got a name out of the mess.”

“Whose?” Winter cautiously pressed as he made strong black tea with swift, practiced motions. Loki preferred coffee, the really nasty Turkish style that tasted as bitter as he felt.

“Steven Rogers,” Loki purred quietly, his intent gaze more than sharp enough to spot a couple of physical tells about recognition.

“Nobody I know,” Winter said harshly. Oddly enough, he looked like a man convinced he was telling the truth. Apparently, unlike Loki, he'd never taken time to visit the Smithsonian or he might realize he was dreaming out of his oldest past, all the way back to childhood.

“Someone I've...met. I'm quite sure roughly **all** of Captain America's fans would, shall we say, disagree with my opinion of him.” _Annoying little bitch confusing righteousness with the bullshit you Midgardians call patriotism_ was where that mess started, and it didn't clean up from there.

Another small wave of tells had greeted the title, but Winter did not speak again as he finished his tea and padded back to the room he'd claimed. One long glare over a metal-bound shoulder was enough to lay down some ugly-strong boundaries.

Sometimes, these days, even Loki knew when not to push for more answers or so much as any kind of direct interaction. He had to remain aware that he was no less fragile and mortal than anyone else on Midgard, and that for all his own retained skill in trickery, deceit, and close combat, his reticent companion was perfectly well capable of bare-handed murder. Provided he decided not to use any of the seven or eight knives he seemed to have on his person at all times.

Winter didn't speak again at all until, a week after he'd emerged from holing up in his room for a couple of days over it, the name Loki would have told him sparked off Winter's lips like entire galaxies had not been mentioned again.

Loki had no intention of telling his surly, dangerous companion that, no matter whether Winter was actually still brain-blanked or he was lying his ( _really nice, for a Midgardian man_ ) ass off, no matter if the half-feral bastard was asleep when he spoke the most...

Lately, even thinking about Winter deciding to want a future with someone better for him ( _which, face it, would be exactly what my false brother would have rightly called around about **anyone** else here on Midgard, that deceitful bilgesnipe Fury even!_ ) or to kick his uninvited guest back onto a lonely nomadic trail was starting to light an unfamiliar, not entirely welcome burn in Loki's belly. Even the thought of maybe waking to an otherwise empty house—that one door open, the room behind it cleared, was unfriendly and unhappy for him, and getting harder to escape.

Alone enough so much in the still air and weak light, the distracted exile never realized when such thoughts often had his upper lip drawn tight, baring his clenched teeth.


	5. Don't F-ing Tell Me What I'll Believe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly a conversation about trust and beliefs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it looks like the automatic chapter counter may be failing to hold onto that total of 17 part. There will be a bunch of fairly short chapters to come before I hit a long-ish one. Also, I remain uncertain about F-bombs in chapter titles being acceptable, so I choose to err on the side of caution there.

“Knock it off, asshole.”

“What?”

“You're staring again. I hate that shit.”

“So why stay?” _Is it my fault you're fucking gorgeous, a living work of art, you snarky incredibly dangerous fucking Midgardian jackass? I will take the fault for saying nothing about my tastes, because I don't plan to be dead **quite** yet..._

“I was here first, in case you'd forgotten. Why do you stay?”

“You haven't tried to kill me. Not sure there's anywhere else in your world I could say that if I left this place.” Winter responded by dispassionately pulling his favorite pistol, his original service issue Remington Colt Model 1911A1, a beautifully cared-for relic of World War II that his hand had known intimately since the middle of a century recently ticked past, and putting the muzzle snug to the skin between Loki's eyebrows.

“Any time you really want to be done with your life, let me know. I'm as good a shot at five hundred yards as I am from right here, so you can always request a surprise ending if you don't want to see it coming.”

“I'll remember that.” For once, Loki wasn't joking, and he'd seen plenty enough on their subsistence hunts to think a shot from the furthest range the sniper felt comfortable at would still bring a no-reflex kill; if he asked for it at any distance he knew he'd be free before his body hit the ground. He also, however, still wasn't _frightened_ so the gun got put away, its muzzle stamp fading quickly from where it had been pressed into his spare flesh. “How's breakfast coming?”

“We're getting low on pork.”

“Do you feel like taking the hunt, or shall I?”

“I've been thinking about that. I'm the better shot, but I've never seen anyone scout and track like you. It's like you don't feel the cold.”

“I don't, not much. It's...part of what I used to be.” Those words seemed to strike a strong resonance in Winter as did so many similar offhand comments, provoking a hard turn to a safe topic. “Don't think I haven't noticed whatever was done to you helps you tolerate it too. Sounds like you want to try tandem close combat with a Russian wild boar in the armpit of the season. I'm all for it.” _Even bronc-riding four hundred pounds of armored nightmare equipped with tusks that'll gut us in the first heartbeat we get careless is probably safer than so much time alone with you as the seasons move along..._

“Starting to sound like you think you can trust me,” Winter growled with a clear warning in his raspy tone. He'd **seen** the things trust could be forced to do by evil. Once again, the other man grabbed the conversational reins and pulled hard into a new direction.

“I trust you not to kill me without a reason, and that's about as far as it goes which is actually just fine with me. And I've always preferred interesting company to good company.”

“I should kill you for that, you nutbag.”

“At least you'd make it quick. Again, not sure there's anywhere else in your world.”

“You keep calling it _my_ world and this _Realm_. Everything I saw about that fuckup in New York claims you're not even human, really, or weren't back then. Where the fuck are you from, anyway?”

“The doors to my past are all nailed shut now, so it hardly matters. And you wouldn't believe me.” That earned him a slow and steady glare.

“I was born in 1916 or 1917, depending on which account you read,” Winter spat with his usual casual hostility, flooring his companion with the first actual personal detail he'd deliberately divulged—and choosing one it happened Loki knew to be true thanks to that museum exhibit. “But biologically I'm...about thirty, I think. The things that were done so I could survive cryo did a lot of other things too. I've had someone smaller but nastier than you rip my mind out of my body and remake me into a nightmare I could never have imagined before it was my own life, a life that I can only see on film because decades were lost to me and when I was awake I was muzzled and controlled. Lost everything in my life that mattered to science they still say now can't be matched, almost a century after it was used on me. **Don't** fucking tell me what I'll believe.”

Reluctantly and hating himself a little for that, Loki let it go, let the conversation end there since Winter didn't ask again.

Despite Loki's unease, they were a seamless hunting unit from their first team stalk. In all, they got back with three young sows, who would be much more tender and tasty than the immense boar who had tried and failed to guard them.


	6. A Nice Blanket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their tension with one another is beginning to take on a different tone and feel...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup, the automatic chapter tracker is not keeping that "of 17" part.

Just as the exile was stepping out of the little hot spring he'd found not far from the house, the air around him went tense and quiet. He paused, well aware that something had to be extremely wrong whether he could see it or not.

“ **Loki! Back in the water!** ” Winter bellowed from somewhere behind him, and even as he obeyed with nearly serpentine grace there was a shuffle, a roar, and the sounds—snarling, crashing, and the weird sound of that mechanical left arm Winter would not talk about even in his sleep—of what could only be a massively scaled-up rolling cat fight. It didn't last long, and after a long few minutes the other man stepped back into line of sight from a roughed-up thicket of young trees. He was covered in blood, leaves, twigs, and long coarse light brown hair. Loki went very, very still in the ( _lucky for me_ ) slightly murky water, hoping to hide his reaction when Winter casually threw off all his bloody clothing and slipped into the spring. The veteran didn't speak for a good long while, and stayed near where the outflow ran fastest so he could let the blood and hair wash away. What few scratches and bruises showed as his skin got clean healed with eerie, visible speed.

“Wanna hand me my shirt?” Silent still, Loki did as asked, repeating the process with each other pice of clothing until they were all at least half clean and drying on rocks. “Well, she's a fat bitch for this early in the season. If bear's not too greasy or too gamy for you, we'll have jerky for at least half of next winter. Chewy, but nutritious.” Winter was plenty strong enough, once he'd gutted the bear, to drag the carcass home with very little help, and they'd have at least a week of distraction processing a kill that big.

“Never been much of a picky eater,” Loki shrugged. From as far away as the pool would let him get while still covering the fact that he had an annoyingly persistent erection. It wasn't the first time Winter making a casual reference to a future in which he hadn't shot Loki had just about undone the exile's control over his mouth.

“Me neither. And she'll make a nice blanket when the snow comes back.” The very thought made Loki glad he had apparently retained his Jotun immunity to cold—he'd take night watch **all** fucking winter before he'd curl up warm and cozy next to the ( _admit it, he's the kind of guy you want to either fuck into the floor or split yourself in half on, you **harlot**_ ) man who had taken the name of the fiercest season in a hard land for his own.


	7. Quit Hissing At Me Like A Bitchy Small Pet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not one of Loki's best days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last upload for today. The next chapter will be a bit longer than most if not all the previous posts.

“What aren't you telling me?” They hadn't spoken for days, but the sudden question didn't faze Loki for so much as a blink.

“Well, basically **everything**. Not like you'd care and even the interesting parts would take an entire season to explain, so why are you asking?”

“You have no idea what I might care about,” Winter hissed; the changing weather sometimes wound him up all snarky this way.

“You're not a fucking python or a house cat. Quit with the deflating-tire impression. You've made it plenty clear that you don't actually _want_ to talk about anything but the practicalities of our little...arrangement. Fine with me. It's worked so far, at least, so why change now?”

“You can still go any time you want. On your feet to wherever you end up or on your back to a shallow grave.”

Loki gazed out at the snowfall taking them out of the short summer. “You have no reason to care, but there's still nowhere I can go and be as sure as I am here that I'll be allowed to _choose_ if I want to be put to death for my crimes or just stagger along in some skeleton of a life until nature has its way with me. Quit hissing at me like a bitchy small pet and either shoot me or leave me the fuck alone a while, Winter.”

As always, the brown-haired man bowed out of the scratchy, irritable conversation without noticing his entire effect on his lanky black-haired companion—the wondering expression, the lingering unease, or the ( _shit, I could get a job driving railroad spikes if he stays in line of sight!_ ) still annoyingly persistent erection.


	8. Winter Walked Like Snowfall, In Silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guys get a visitor who isn't actually all that welcome.

“What the hell's wrong with you?” The lack of judgment in his question got him a rare honest answer through a free flow of tears the like of which he'd never seen while under his own control, not even watching his best friend fade behind him when he went to war with all the other brave, strong young men. While he went to meet the savage destiny that had wound him up with the prosthetic arm and the blank places in his memory that often spanned decades, his fate leading him into a very long life without any place for the brother and forbidden love his heart had chosen so long ago.

“ _You're_ the lucky one. I have to remember everything. _Every_ betrayal, every death, all the sick sad disappointment in the eyes of those who called themselves my friends, having my family turn out to be a lie and then having everything I knew, all I was fool enough to love, ripped away because **they** lied. Because **they** broke me and threw me out. Get the fuck away from me, Winter. Go enjoy the holes in your head while I decide if it's time for you to put me down yet.”

“I'm heading out on a deep perimeter check. Let me know what you've decided when I get back.” Loki just made a vulgar gesture and continued weeping into his own kneecaps, huddled on the pile of pelts he'd hunted himself over time.

The next afternoon, Loki was not surprised to hear the back door open and close while he was making his lunch; deep perimeter checks tended to run about a full twenty-four hours. The second he heard footsteps, though, he grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen before whirling to face the door.

Winter walked like snowfall, in silence.

“A pleasure to see you again too, brother,” Thor said quietly from the kitchen door, eyes on the knife with the respect he knew very well that any short-range weapon in Loki's strong, hard-trained hands truly deserved. This little green-eyed prick had put more than one knife in him already, after all.

“You were **never** my brother,” was the snapped return. “Come to see me rotting in my banishment, hoping to find me bowed down under the weight of my sentence? Come to lie me sweet promises about taking me back to a home that was never mine?”

“We were raised brothers, Loki.”

“Yes, but only one of us actually mattered... _Odinson_.” He did not relax, even when the brawny blond looked away sadly from his cynical sarcasm and needling that had already sunk at least one point home. “Tell me, did **your** Allfather send you to collect me for further damnation and punishment? Here to take me to another false home, back to _that_ false home, to lay my weak mortality out in the light before all of mighty Asgard for betraying their glorious ideals? Time to prove that I would never be enough, that now I am so frail that any Asgardian might snap me in half at a whim?” Every word was as bitter as loneliness, dripping with acid that would have eaten straight through the foundation if it had been more than just a tone of voice. Objectively, he knew he was lying at least a little; _nothing_ truly frail survived in the taiga, out in the wooded wilderness that made him feel welcome in any season.

Before Thor could put together an answer to that, or figure out how to explain his visit, the small kitchen window above the sink exploded, the distinctive tinkle of shattered glass muffling the sharper, less musical cracking lagging behind the impact. The blond went down with a roar while Loki remained in a taut defensive crouch until he assessed the situation. It was pretty easy to figure out, once there was no further noise from Thor for a long moment as he fought his eyes rolling back, struggling not to pass out while so very vulnerable.

Thor had been shot twice. Both his arms were cleanly broken not far above the elbow, through-and-through wounds from a fairly small-caliber weapon. While he was still down and trying to stay conscious under the assault of pain and shock, Loki darted over and deftly slipped Mjolnir's strap around its owner's thick neck.

“Get him the **fuck** out of my house, Heimdall,” the slim, pale exile spat, a heat in his green eyes that would have surprised Winter a great deal. “We **don't** want him back.”

“'We'...?” was all Thor had time to choke out and then he was gone, taken by some quieter method than the possibly-repaired Bifrost.

“Who the fuck did I have to shoot in our kitchen?” Winter asked about half an hour later when he walked in to find Loki diligently scrubbing blood out of the floorboards.

“He thought he was still my brother,” came the flat answer.

“So I shouldn't have shot him.”

“Actually, if you hadn't I might have cut his fucking throat myself to silence his lies about whose family I came from, where I should feel at home, and what anyone else but you and me thinks I deserve. Arterial spray would have made a much bigger mess.”

“Oh. Here. I can help.” And, without another word, Winter set to scrubbing alongside his emotionally wounded, baffled, reeling ( _and so, **so** horny watching him rock and flow smoothly into the work, this is **going** to get embarrassing eventually..._ ) roommate.


	9. Great Idea, He Didn't Say

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of internal-only dialog in this one, for once most of it Winter's.

“What is it with you and night watch? No one's disturbed any of my alerts, not one in the last two **years**. Your...not your brother...hasn't been back. I've found no sign anywhere we're being watched, followed, or hunted, singly or as a pair. Give it a rest.”

“I was never a soldier like you. I don't do orders,” Loki retorted, still gearing up for a brutal twelve-hour shift out in the vastness and drifts and comforting velvety dark with only starlight and wolf song and his own pluming breath for company. Later in the season there would be the cracking, groaning, and squealing of rotting ice for counterpoint, but it was still too early, too cold for that on this uneasy night when the auroras would turn the snow as green as his own eyes.

“Then why not just stay here and get some rest?”

_With you for the warmth no doubt,_ he didn't say. _Under the bearskin, by the fire, where you have taken to your own comforts. When I know you sleep in as little as the temperature allows,_ he didn't say. _So I can be tempted to loll about in numbing self-indulgent pleasures until I make a greedy mistake you'll kill me for. Which by my estimation would take maybe two and a half minutes, tops. Uh-huh, suuuuure. Great idea,_ he didn't say.

“Very little about you encourages me to rest in your presence,” he did say, quietly, before pulling on his gloves and leaving in a swirl of tougher pelts he'd hunted himself and the black hair he refused to cut flaring from under his deerstalker hat, his green gaze already far afield.

_He **knows**_ , chided the unwelcome little voice that was always waiting there in the back of Winter's head, twined into all his thoughts even while he was recovering his past in chaotic pieces, and even now he was grateful it had finally stopped trying to call him 'Soldat', stopped trying to whisper him back to a medical chamber of horrors. _He **knows** your weakness, your shame, your sickness, your heart of carnal sin. He **knows** you want him stripped to skin and crying out here on this bearskin, begging and whining and moaning your name...He **knows** how twisted you really are, how you want to bite him to bleeding and dare him to let your mouth near his cock after, how you want to lick the lust-sweat off him like he's some kind of literal **fucking** candy, how you might not even mind so much if he felt like smacking your sorry perverted ass around a while first to soften you up from your frozen depths because when you take Winter in so deeply the first thing to fall into permafrost is your pride._

But if he knew, and was put off in any way, disgusted, disdainful, or even just disinterested, why then would Loki keep staying...and keep not mentioning what he surely must know about Winter by now? Could it really be he was just so sure of death out in the wider world and was willing to ignore **anything** to stay in a position to choose when and how he died? True, though, neither of them were inclined to be overly forthcoming with the other... Direct questions were still always about daily chores and seasonal routines, always about their little arrangement... Never about their pasts, their hearts, their memories, any kind of future at all...

_Holy Mother of God,_ could he possibly... _not_ know?


	10. If He Did Not Cry Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winter realizes some things about both of them that he is not the least bit happy about.

_Holy Mother of God, he doesn't know_. Winter, nearly into the kitchen to make his morning tea, stopped in his tracks, momentarily breathless and stilled by the power of revelation.

Loki must have expected him to sleep in much later, or he wouldn't still be shirtless despite the savage vigor he was applying to washing their small stash of dishes. He'd been totally body-shy since the day Winter had used his mechanical arm to beat a fucking **bear** to death in his defense and the former soldier had let himself ignore it, thinking it was because Loki _had_ to know his secret, his sinful heart and wicked wishes.

“I know you're there no matter how lightly you walk. Your tea stuff is set up on the stove.” Without turning, Loki slithered oh so gracefully back into a couple of his typical lightweight upper-body layers. He'd had plenty of time to adjust to the climate, and though he was capable of healing from some pretty bad frostbite he still barely felt the cold even when it was killing him slowly.

And that was when _Winter_ quite suddenly **knew** something right down to the marrow of his own raw bones...that some hidden agony in Loki _was_ killing him slowly. That Loki, under his natural grace and brilliant wit and occasional charm and ethereal beauty, planned to _let it_ if he did not cry mercy and ask for a bullet to bring a quicker end.

Winter made his tea in silence, his river-ice gaze far away as he kept a desperate stranglehold on the sudden knowledge that had just undone everything he knew about maintaining their peace.

Winter knew he did not want to lose whoever Loki was now, or anything left of what he had been, or the ephemeral promise of what he could be.

Winter knew abruptly that he did not **want** to pull that trigger any more. Wasn't sure he could, now, if asked. Didn't know what to say or how to feel about that, or about the return of a powerful emotion he had not felt since before boot camp—the desire to care about the welfare of another person. It really was still incredibly hard for him to believe in his own free will even after it had gone unchallenged so long, and that bothered Winter too. He wondered if it _was_ time for one of them to leave, or maybe time to put Loki down as they discussed fairly often. Maybe even time to put himself on his back in a shallow grave stacked over with slabs of limestone and granite to keep the bears off so that fucking mechanical arm could never be found and used to birth a new set of technological horrors upon the world.

He mostly kept to his room for several days after that impressively awkward morning, often with the window open despite the cold, because he knew Loki might very well literally _smell_ his sin otherwise. Grateful for the lock on the door, because of course Loki picked the **worst** time to knock every one of the few tries he gave it, mournfully hoping Winter was going to be all right if he was even still there every time in a low voice before slipping away again, likely to short-range hunting or patrolling.

Because of course, _every single damn time_ the strange, slender beauty who haunted more and more of Winter's dreams that were not nightmares knocked on that locked door and never tried to force it to find out if the room was even occupied, Winter had his hand around his cock, which often refused to relent into softness again until he'd come three or four times. Only barely, those days when Loki knocked and got no answer, did Winter keep his teeth clamped shut on the name he'd only moan low in the back of his throat when he was utterly sure he was alone. He knew when to bite that moan back now, before it could fling itself from his heaving lungs in a scream, before he could paint his mind in shades of moon-pale skin and spring-green eyes framed by raven-black hair, before he painted his own belly in thick streaks of white to burn him deeper than ice could ever hope to reach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will be a solo post, as it's the longest in the work.


	11. Even With Blood On His Teeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, for all the patient readers, a tipping point is reached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm only doing this one today, and not just because it's long and cleaning it up in Rich Text mode is gonna take a while. It's offline stuff--specifically, the universe seems to find it HILARIOUS for me to wake up on Friday mornings with things like the dental abscess I'm currently dealing with. Guess who's not in their offices on Friday? If you guessed "my doctor for an antibiotic prescription", "my dentist for an emergency exam", or "the one person who might be able to help me schedule transportation on short notice", you're right! Been a heck of a weekend, and I have way too many phone calls to make...and just enough time to get this chapter whipped into readable shape before anyone's offices start opening.

“You're acting weird, Winter, even for you.” Spring was upon the land, and since it was still a few weeks early for the bears to be about, Loki had been enjoying the hot spring. Until he had company, even silent and carefully distant. “Knowing...whatever I really do know about you...my first guess will be it's time for me to choose between that bullet you promised and putting all the ground I can between this place and my feet.” He sounded more resigned than sad, one of the hardest tricks left to him now, used to mask the cold whirl of terror and grief that had been building in him over time as he started to feel ice cracking somewhere deep in his belly and brain alike every time they spoke. Every time they brushed just a little too close, and that had happened quite a bit lately. Every time that blue-grey gaze would not lift to meet his own. Every time he caught himself watching Winter and thinking about that promise of a bullet, the promise of the swift route to freedom few others could offer such an outcast even if they cared to.

“You're wrong,” Winter answered softly, gently, a voice Loki had never heard from him setting the exile's nerves to high alert—he mistrusted **any** kind of behavioral changes where the brainwashed veteran was concerned. So much so that when Winter risked real honesty, the other man shut down completely for a few seconds. “I've been remembering since before you even showed up. My life, before and after...” he trailed off with an expressive shrug of his robotic arm and shoulder. “I do know the name you told me I say in my dreams.”

“You don't say that name any more, actually, when I hear you talking in your sleep. It's really been a while. But there's a huge museum in America that has...a very impressive permanent exhibit. I gathered while there that you and Rogers had a very strong bond early in life.” _Maybe even more than being the brothers your hearts chose over blood, which might be why I don't want to test that limit...because I know the pain that comes with crossing that line in any way at all...and I honestly think **you'd** kill me for trying._

“We did. His health was bad before he stumbled into Stark and Erskine, and once his mother died my family practically adopted him. Once he was out on his own, James was all he had.” The use of that name startled Loki visibly. “I'm not that man any more. Neither is he. He's a good man, a nation's hero, an inspiration worth looking up to, but he's not the Steven Rogers who had nearly-lethal asthma, who had to find the most dangerous possible way to serve his precious country in my footsteps not even **hours** after he tried to tell me he had nothing to prove, who used to fill one sketch pad after another with beauty and hardly even have to think about what his hands did. Just like I am no longer the man who pushed his hot buttons to make him take care of himself before the war, the man who kept pulling him out of back-alley beatings and patching him back together, the man who kept trying to teach him to dance and set him up on double dates. James and Steven are irretrievably lost, leaving Winter and Captain America in their shoes. Winter and Captain America will never be a good combination in any way or situation. Maybe once, but that door to the past, like yours, is closed, locked, and bricked behind a wall as if it had never existed.”

“Before my exile...” Loki breathed, wound up taut and terrified that even after such honesty he might still trip a vicious booby trap in his companion's temperament and pay for it with his life, “I came across the information that he is still searching for you. Even now I doubt he's stopped.”

“He'll never stop; that's never been who he was. As far as I know that man only ever tried to back out of a fight once no matter how bad the tactical situation was around him, and it was only because Hydra sent me to him freshly wiped and unmasked so he'd have no choice but to see who he thought he'd have to kill to bring them down. He's looking for his friend, his wartime companion, his heart's hero.” ( _His first love, because he thought he had hidden that so, so much better from even me, but even then I could see past the hero worship._ ) “He's looking for _Bucky_ , and his beloved Bucky was the **first** person I had to murder in cold blood or be put to death for refusing. Steven doesn't understand _there's no coming back_ from knowing I did that to both of them when I should have let **his** Bucky die proudly, with dignity, instead of listening to some sick self-preservation instinct. There's no coming back from the way knowing that would strip him of any hope I had of being respected from that quarter. He'll never understand **how** he was betrayed.”

“Would you try to learn to be Bucky again if he found you and asked that?”

Winter's startled gaze got a little wider when he realized Loki not only hadn't meant to say that, he was fucking well _blushing_ over it despite his obvious fear. It was faint, true, but while he watched that surprisingly charming pale-pink flush spread nearly to the slender man's nipples. And then he took a closer look and realized Loki was terrified right to the bone, skating the edge of panic, and clearly contemplating a mad dash for home with or without any of his clothing—and possibly considering flight a great deal further than the house. Grinning a false ease, the stockier man curled his legs up, then kicked off the rocky side of the spring to cross it as quickly and gracefully as a seal, pulling himself up short of actually touching Loki. It was time to settle a few matters that had been simmering on his mental back burner long enough at last.

“No.” His single word put a stop to that pale chest rising and falling for a long moment even while the pulse in the slender man's long throat sped up.

Before Loki could put together a coherent response, Winter was so... **so**...close, their noses nearly touching.

“I see what's in you, eating away at you, leaving you full of hollow shadows in place of whatever you actually deserve. I don't know its name but I do want _it_ gone, not you. So, before you fucking faint on me, can I just kiss you or do you actually need CPR to start breathing again?”

He could actually hear something **break** in the frantic noise Loki made before melting into Winter's lips on his own, the slow giving way, the taste and glory when their tongues made careful contact. And in the next breath—a deep one for Loki, almost strangled for Winter—they could no longer keep it slow, or shallow, or false.

_But not too fast_ , Winter, the voice reminded him, provoking a slow moan alongside Loki getting brave enough to take a nip at the side of his thick neck, _don't let him see what you are too fast. Don't let the monster out of its cage. You'll be the death of him if you do. You've no right to someone like him. No right..._

_**NO**_. His chin snapped up on a sharp exhale, and Loki very nearly made good his escape when the sudden change of mood under his warily exploring hands frightened him.

“No,” Winter growled, the heat in his tone nothing to do with his usual aggression this time. A firm grip in Loki's hair helped make his point. “Loki, _you're_ not what I need to have stop. I have all this horrible programming jammed into my head at the expense of everything I ever was or wanted or cared about. Programming that's damaged me so badly I can never go to the love of my sweet young pre-war life and so much as speak his name without snapping his fucking neck. That programming, the voice it left in the back of my mind that tears me apart every time I try to think about anything but bloodshed and vengeance, that is what I am trying to say 'no' to. Not you.” Flexing his right arm slowly, he forced the other man back to him, skin to skin all down their fronts, catching the flinch when Loki figured he was about to die for the crime of the nearly painful erection now pinned between them.

“ **You** ,” he breathed quietly into one of Loki's ears and relishing the way he shivered just a little, “you might just be capable of surviving some of the things I want. I know well enough who you used to be, Loki, just like now I know who I can't be again. I know who I shot for setting foot in our house, who I spared for the sake of anything good that might have been left between you two when you know I could have beheaded him at that range just as easily once I judged him worth spending the ammo. I think you need to know that in your current condition, nothing short of one motherfucker of a lucky surprise kill-shot you can dish out is going to put much of a dent in me. I know I need you to know I'm up to having you give putting a dent in me a serious try, actively interested really, but not with murder on your mind.” Oh, that inviting smile was such a temptation...

“Nothing good comes of loving the like of me,” Loki moaned sadly, brokenly, so very softly, so far out of himself in the moment that he still hadn't noticed his wasn't the only hard-on trapped against his flat, narrow belly.

“When did we start discussing _love_?” Winter grinned, so, **so** many bared teeth in it to tease like the slow silk of his tone. “I'd be perfectly content to fuck you right here in the water, or on the bank, or take you home and throw you on the bearskin, or a hundred other possibilities that have never in any detail depended on the rotted bindings they call 'love' in this world. All those choices, all those chances, and the real heart of the question actually is as simple as admitting I've been trying for a while to figure out how to tell you I find you exceptionally fuckable and not just because we live in isolation with no one but each other. I could probably manage to make some kind of arrangements in town, but it turns out that all my lustful dreams seem to be about you.”

“Then I vote home and a fire to warm the ice out of our bones,” was all the black-haired beauty could choke out before his mouth was busy again, before his higher thought functions were going under again even as he was lifted out of the water to go start assembling his clothing. He didn't bother putting any of it back on along the way.

Not long after, Winter _did_ throw him onto the bearskin and not gently, both of them naked in the low firelight by then, only to have Loki pop right back up and connect a pretty formidable right hook to Winter's face. He still wasn't all that good at controlling his response to being manhandled, but luckily for him that wasn't going to be a serious problem. Even with his own blood on his teeth, Winter did not stop smiling.

“So, how rough can I get with you?” he wondered as he dropped to the furry floor and pulled the slender man down with him, pinning Loki on his back, ending up with a hand on each side of Loki's head and one knee perilously close to his balls.

“Will you stop absolutely anything if I have to ask that of you?” Loki breathed barely more than a whisper, his long lines full of tense fear, his long and slightly curved cock flushed dark against the fold of one hip to twitch with his heartbeat.

Wanting was cold torment, lusting was hot torture, but _needing_ was pure unbridled terror, and Loki had no words at all at the disposal of his silver tongue for how much worse **trust** might be.

“Of course. Some crimes even I will no longer commit now that no one can order me to.”

“Then let's find out how rough you can get with me, Winter, because I'm pretty sure I'll let you do anything you want so long as you just don't lie to me. It's been a very long time since I didn't want to know how fragile I am for a certainty...”

Turned out, even with so much of his old self stripped away, Loki was _extremely_ difficult to injure seriously or break. Getting him to cry out, to howl and groan while he found a reason or three to love living in his own skin, even getting him to moan the name the other man had chosen, well, those things all proved to be delightfully easy. And Winter was crafty even when the situation wasn't tactical.

He'd started with his hands, flesh long before metal, mapping every sensitive spot Loki showed him from the whine that only followed a hard grip at the back of his black hair to how he shivered at any touch to his lips or nipples to his way of pushing into bruising grips mostly in bony areas where the nerves ran shallow. Winter had brought his mouth to bear next, once again sending his now-squirming companion into shudders and gasps and even a whispered, half-swallowed plea or two after he left off at Loki's mouth to start checking all the usual hot spots. Earlobes were good, teeth on the tendons below them even better...light suction applied to his larynx resulted in choked noises and fists in the fur they lay on...his nipples as sensitive as any woman Winter remembered and just the right shade of roughness with them stole Loki's voice entirely for a while.

It wasn't until Loki tangled both hands in the sleek dark brown hair kept long enough to help warm ears and neck, and started sweating, that Winter's control cracked for the first time. He was more on top of his fractious, wiggling target than alongside Loki, and when those long pale hands went tight in his hair he could not help sinking his teeth into the taut fair skin just below a collarbone.

Loki arched under him like a drawn bow despite his weight, barely breathing, mouth open but eyes shut. For a long moment they stayed frozen in that precarious balance of dominance and pain that could be pushed to bliss for both if they could just be so, _so_ careful. Finally, worry driving back fear of the monster at last, Winter turned loose, unsurprised to find blood on his teeth after all. Loki had dropped back onto the bearskin, his eyes unreadable, and Winter was certain he was about to hear 'stop'. He just had time to register the slim man's upper lip starting to lift in a snarl and then Loki surged back up under him and bit him back, in the heavy muscle behind his collarbone, nowhere near drawing blood but good and hard regardless.

And that cracked Winter again. He had to try...he just **had** to...

And with the freshest blood barely gone from his teeth, the howl from Loki that greeted Winter abruptly slipping that pretty tapered curve of hard cock so deep into his mouth that he was surprised to find his own gag reflex gone, well, that sound had no fear to be heard. _So, you truly will let me do anything...Mad or not, you certainly are brave..._

And when he finally took the other man for his own, it was not with the single rough thrust Loki had clearly been expecting. Instead, even as he brought Loki's mouth back to his own after a very long time spent on foreplay, Winter settled smoothly into a new and entrancing rock and flow, daring even to challenge the monster by licking off some of that lust-sweat every time one of them came.

Every time, it was the monster that backed down.

Nights were long in the taiga even at this time of year, but they both proved to have enough stamina that they slept until lunchtime after finally wearing each other out not long before sunrise.


	12. Oh, My Lovely Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just another night patrolling the taiga.

“Have you ever stopped to notice that the taiga is truly beautiful?”

“Have you ever gotten a boar for us when you confuse talking with stalking?”

“I'm serious. Maybe I see it, hear it, feel it differently than you do because of my heritage. My family tree is built of surprisingly hardy blooms on limbs of frost, flowers made of cutting ice and burning cold. But this land is lovely, from the rime tracings on the evergreens to the vast and busy sky on clear nights in all seasons.” When he turned to silence behind him, Winter was not, as he'd expected, gone. But he was smiling, the kind of smile not really meant to encourage trust. The smile Loki gave him in return had too many teeth to be called entirely friendly. “Oh, my lovely Winter, but have we ever gotten a boar when you confuse lust with trust because I've run my mouth?”

The rough grip in his hair was perfect, the teeth on his neck where he had a distinct weak spot in his cold, sarcastic armor were bliss...and then the frozen ground under his knees when he was yanked down onto them, the slow moan he couldn't contain these days when clothes started coming open...and that soft, lustful noise Winter always made when he remembered that Loki's blood was only cold in metaphors, that his mouth felt as hot inside as a furnace, that he had no gag reflex, that in all this time with so many easy routes and easier reasons he had _never_ left in solitude other than patrolling or hunting alone...

“I can hear you when you think like that,” Loki joked, baring his teeth again in idle threat when Winter casually slapped him for stopping without warning. “Where else in the world could I go and be allowed to live, to survive on my own terms, to choose whether I would leave or die? Who else in the world would let me live despite my crimes, let me learn how to truly live with all my lies stripped clean? And besides all that, there _are_ those sounds you make...” Smirking, hands behind his back because there was something about that he knew Winter really liked, he went back to working on getting that beautiful cock, shorter but thicker than his own, so far in he'd be able to feel dense, crisp curls against the tip of his nose. This had become a favorite hobby as the seasons passed and both of them relaxed into their strange arrangement.

The sound Winter **only** made when he got off harder than even he expected from being blown was a song that did sweeter things for Loki than any battle hymn or loving serenade in Asgard ever had.

Loki had decided early on to let Winter take the lead between them most days, but it still hadn't taken long for the exile to map the other man as well as he knew his own personal terrain to be understood. That thing about Loki's hands being restrained—by rope or by simple act of will—was not about domination, as many watching such a relationship from the outside might have thought.

When Loki hit the worst, darkest kinds of moods and honestly _needed_ a solid smacking around to realign all his mental and emotional gears, it turned out there was a very easy trigger that an entirely different kind of conditioning had installed for Winter. All Loki ever had to do on those days was remind his lover that the reason Winter got off on having the other man's hands forced out of their play was rooted in **trust**.


	13. A Tourist, Two Ghosts, And Sometimes A Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, when you're at the mercy of a translator, it's not about the questions you ask. Sometimes it's about the ones you don't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The laika is not so much a breed of dog as what's called a "landrace". Landrace dogs all tend to share similar shape, size, and conformation because of the environment in which they live and work. The azawakh sighthound, a Sub-Saharan African cousin of the greyhound, is another landrace. The Canaan dog of Israel and the Middle East is another. In general, laika dogs are very much like huskies--the Siberian husky is descended from laikas. There are many good images and stories relating to laikas in the Werner Herzog documentary Happy People.

“He is looking for information,” the translator told the shopkeep, gesturing to the very still but obviously uncomfortable tourist behind her. The big stranger seemed both anxious and guarded at once, and while he wasn't the first tourist to find this place it was a rare occasion—but none of the others had acted like this one. “He is looking for a man he knows from his own past, a man he thinks may live near here.” That got the stranger a slow, dark look. The tall blond responded by casually emptying every pocket in his clothing onto the counter, then sweeping off his parka to demonstrate that there wasn't anywhere left he could hide a weapon. Then again, the old shopkeep knew how to look past surfaces, and this wasn't a man who needed a weapon. He _was_ a weapon if he needed one.

“Why is he looking here?”

“Someone he trusts told him this might be the right place,” the translator said after a brief conversation in English. “He's not hunting blood, only words, and wishes no one here any harm.”

“What do **you** think of him?”

“I think he is sad, and lonely, and honest. Whoever he's looking for, I don't think he's after blood on his hands. I know a hunter when I see one, and he is not.”

“Tell me about this man he seeks, then.” And the old-timer local listened carefully. His answers, however, were only about the description he was given. Sure, the stranger _probably_ knew it wasn't just one man, that there were **two** of those terrifying winter-born demons in the old house and sometimes a wolf with them as well. If he cared, he'd ask, this pumped-up caricature of capitalism and city life, but he only asked about one of them. And so he was told only about one of them, the only one who ever showed up in town and then only on scarce supply and trading runs during which he was all business and spoke as little as necessary despite impressive fluency for someone they all knew was not a local.

Even the elders might never have known about his linguistically challenged other half if not for a growing store of tales hunters brought back with their sables from long winter trapping routes. 'A green-eyed nightmare, a milky shade slipping through the trees, silent as snowfall, swift as a spring river no matter how cold,' the hunters would say, and some of the drunkards among them swore that one or both men could shapeshift into owls or wolves. They paid him little further attention because he did not trifle with their precious sable traps or the quarry the hunters sought all winter long. They did not track him, not after some of the less drunk ones noticed that if he stumbled across campsites in use he tried to be gone before he was seen. There was also a growing layer of superstition around some of the stories, which had begun with one hunter admitting there was **something** man-shaped out in the taiga that his stalwart hunting laikas wouldn't bark at near camp, wouldn't trail if ordered, and had only refused him once on a command to attack because that command would have pitted them against the green-eyed forest wraith. More trappers and woodsmen with similar stories came forward immediately, but those stories weren't what this American wanted to hear.

So the two half-ghosts who might be shapeshifters, and sometimes a wolf alongside them, weren't part of what he was told.


	14. He's Perfectly Capable Of Making His Opinions Known

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uninvited guests can be bloody well annoying.

_Well, fuck_.

Loki swung the ax down one more time, not to split but to lodge it in the stump for easy access if he needed to try to fight. _Hey, at least we did have some decent time before the world barged in again. I wonder which one of us **this** asshole is expecting to kill today._

His face impassive, Loki crossed his arms and returned the cool blue gaze of Steven Rogers, who had just ambled out of the woods in civvies like it was no big thing, showing up here out of nowhere, unannounced but probably armed to the teeth and with some kind of special strike team shadowing his every step out there in the endless forest.

“Just have your men shoot me and get it over with,” Loki invited flatly.

“I'm alone. You're not...actually...”

“Who you expected to find?”

“Well, yeah. Nobody ever mentioned you anywhere along the line, actually. Nat's contact gave her the right description, but it ain't yours.”

“Let me guess,” with a sneer, “brawny, brown hair, blue eyes, about my height, won't leave his left arm uncovered, doesn't talk much?” A nod was met with an even colder glare. “He's not here.”

“Do...do you know where he is?” Still no aggression from the blond, but that didn't ease the other man down at all.

“Not specifically, although it would probably be within reason to believe he's got a line of sight on you by now.” He rarely used a gun any more, knowing that buying ammo was an enormous risk no matter how he tried to go about it, but it was easy to keep in practice. Winter was every bit the same world-class marksman whether it be with a gun, a bow, or a rock in a sling.

“I see.”

“Do you, Captain? Do you truly **see** , I wonder?”

“I don't answer to rank any more. I don't wear the suit. Someone else's job now, the shield too. Someone else's name. Someone else's face behind the cowl. I'm just Steve, just a guy from Brooklyn.”

“And you're looking for Bucky. Good as gold, your beloved Bucky, your best friend growing up, the reason you put yourself at risks even I couldn't have calculated before I was stripped of all meaning and banished to wither here as a mortal after you and I last met.”

“Nat doesn't make it a policy to take unreliable sources seriously.” Loki's fate was a lot to process, so he fell back on his original information for safety and comfort alike.

“You won't find him.”

“You sound very sure.”

“So does he when your name has come up in conversation...about half a dozen times now, maybe, I can think of in all the time I've been here, and I got here not long after that debacle in your New York City.”

“So are you supposed to relay a message to me or something? I'm not in the mood for your cute little conversational dick moves, Loki.” Now irritation was starting to seep into his relaxed posture where he was leaning up against a tree. Which he promptly leaped away from, having heard a nasty buzzing way too close to his ear and assumed there was a nest of wasps or bees. What he saw—a smoking-fresh ricochet mark gouged into the bark—even as he finally heard the sharp crack of the shot turned his guts to ice water.

“No, I think he's perfectly capable of making his opinions known without my help.”

Rogers studied the tree a moment, and then the line of sight into the forest even though he knew it had to be useless; Bucky had been horrified at first to discover that he was a highly talented sniper all the way back at boot camp, but when he was shown how many lives he could save with a few well-placed shots he stopped being afraid of that part of himself. And that had truly been his first step away from any hope of recovering any innocence left to Steve's childhood best friend and secret love.

The next bullet came from a very different direction and kicked up a clump of forest floor in between Rogers's feet.

“I don't think he wants you here,” was all Loki said before picking up another trunk section, working his ax head loose, and going back to chopping their winter wood supply with fluid, efficient motions. “Since you're the only trespasser who's ever gotten even one warning shot, I doubt the next one will be a warning, or even survivable. Maybe I **can** send a message with you,” he mused when he could tell Steve was about to finally wise up and bolt for the cover of the forest. “Might be best if you let the spider know she won't get a word out if she tries to follow in your _highly_ ill-advised footsteps.”


	15. Smoothly Into The Rock And Flow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "...and all the sass and snark a man can stand in one life, I suppose.”
> 
> Well, that and sex. Not super-graphic (there are MUCH better explicit writers here, hats off to them!) and not entirely friendly every time.

“Knock it off, asshole,” Loki chuckled.

“What?”

“You're staring again. I hate that shit.” While there were still massive gaps in his deeper past, Winter had forgotten little of what had happened since coming to himself and bolting for the shelter of the deep woods, eventually remembering this disused safe house when a road sign had triggered a rush of details about the area. He remembered this conversation, just with the roles reversed—he had growled and sworn, and the exile had been forced to think fast back when he still had good reason to fear for his life over a conversational misstep.

“So why stay?” Winter purred back.

“No rent, quiet neighborhood, and all the sass and snark a man can stand in one life, I suppose.” Damn, some days he still forgot just how **fast** his lover was, and this time he took a potato to the side of his head for his inattention. He threw it back pretty hard, pegging Winter in the center of his broad chest with a hearty smacking sound before the spud fell back onto the pile the brawny man was peeling for stew tonight and some extra to dry for hunting rations.

“You pay later, smartass,” Winter growled.

“What? You threw it first! _And_ hit me in the head,” Loki protested.

“And I threw it because you're a smartass, which is why you pay later.” _And I know some very entertaining ways to keep that sassy mouth of yours too busy for words...because we both know your silver tongue is even better at some actions than with the words you do have a genuine gift for._

This time, 'later' meant after dinner, when Winter casually invited Loki to spar a little. But he had that very specific grin, the one he only broke out when sparring was meant to turn into foreplay, and Loki liked that grin a lot. So they settled into this familiar kind of rock and flow in the moment, each landing an insincere shot or two at a time until getting close meant getting bitten. Getting bitten provoked biting back, and as usual neither of them paid much attention to the order of things between the first time biting turned to kissing and when they were both messily spent and heaving for air as they stretched out on what was actually their fourth bearskin rug in front of the fireplace.

This time, possibly provoked by the sarcastic idle chatter early in the day, they'd ventured into territory that was hardly unknown but that they rarely explored. This time had included quite a bit of Winter, normally very much the kind of man who stayed on top both literally and behaviorally when they got into even their craziest, most wanton sexual moods, just laying back to take the kind of things he normally dealt.

The first time _had_ been an accident, an unexpected moment in a situation that wasn't all that unusual in and of itself. Sparring was only one way to keep them both in the shape they each preferred; wrestling like street fighters was another and there were those times when Loki just genuinely **liked** being forcibly wrestled into submission.

Such matches tended to go 'traditional Greco-Roman' quickly, meaning sweaty clothing and any accessories that could be used as a handhold were quick to wind up tossed aside. Indoor matches, in particular, got messy the fastest because not only was it sweaty work, Winter knew by now that there were at least half a dozen ways to get his frisky, durable, fast-reloading lover off without ever getting any of his own body parts anywhere near Loki's dick.

And on one of their earliest of those slick, athletic nights in front of the fireplace, though, just the right twist and lurch was all it took to lock both to momentary stillness.

“So sorry,” Loki managed somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, fighting for air at the astonishing and unfamiliar sensation...that sleek, arched taper that Winter so loved to taste was as slicked up from the rest of their play as all their other skin, and despite Winter's usual distaste for being fucked his body had offered no resistance to the sudden intrusion that Loki would have expected to have met with a roar and a very serious attempt at grievous bodily harm directed his way. It took a drastic change for them to realize their usual roles were reversing—a circumstance that Loki had never dared contemplate, much less vocalize, one that he had no idea how to survive, much less enjoy. The bigger man's voice had been effectively stolen by suddenly remembering why other men had always twisted and noised about under him when he located their prostate with either his fingers or his cock. The combination of how they were positioned and the exact shape of Loki's cock had parked the flared rim to twitch ever so slightly with Loki's pulse...and right up against his lover's inexperienced prostate.

The former soldier's voice remained locked in right up until Winter, his vision whited out like a blizzard had struck the inside of his head, make a very familiar sound as Loki made to cautiously pull back. It was a sound Loki knew all too well, one with a world to say and not a word in it, and he froze in place again.

It was the same keening Loki made when he was so deeply locked into their smooth rock and flow that it was the only way left to reassure Winter he **wanted** whatever they were doing to continue, and it sounded very different in the burly man's throat but meant exactly the same thing.

Carefully, warily, Loki rocked back and forth ever so slightly. His immediate reward was the heavier man arching under him with a deep, low moan, his entire attitude tattling about what he wanted from the rest of this accidental situation.

“I...could try to...demonstrate why I make some of your _favorite_ noises,” Loki risked in a taunting little purr. Winter, eyes still shut as he learned to adjust, shivered as he nodded consent—and then threw his head back and howled when his lover borrowed a trick from their very first time and bit him to bleeding just below a collarbone.

Most of their time would still be spent with Loki doing as he was told, the way it suited both of them best, but every once in a while the metal hand would get locked to prevent major injury while Loki was the one to use his lover's entire body as a playground.


	16. My Last Gift To You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A slightly less unwelcome visitor shows up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Agh, next to last chapter and I don't have the next story ready! Writer angst... :)

The woman who knocked on the door was not Nat, the spider from out of his still mostly-lost past. Winter answered, because he had the house to himself and was curious...as well as prepared to take down hostile strangers the second he saw that intent in them. What he found on his doorstep was a tall, austere woman of indeterminate age holding herself with impeccable calm. She did not react to the narrowing of that cool blue-grey gaze.

“Not many strangers in this part of central Asia,” he finally growled. “You selling vacuum cleaners or something?”

“I am a mother in search of a moment with a lost son.” 

_Oh... **shit**.  _ “He's not much into company these days, and he really isn't here right now. Sorry you had to spend all that time hunting him to ground.” At that, she chuckled.

“Heimdall has never lost sight of him. I needed only to ask, not to hunt.”

“Oh. Well, fuck. You might as well come in and let me make you some tea, Your Majesty.”

“I bring no unearned social status with me, and today I am a mother, not a diplomat. Please address me as Frigga.”

“All right then, Frigga, ask away and if I can tell you whatever it is you need to take home with you I will.”

“I have asked Heimdall the things I already wanted to know. Sadly, I've not come to invite him home. I know he would refuse, and that I have no right to take choice from him. I saw you put a gun to his head, more than once, but only to offer him peace. I also saw you take a beautifully careful shot at a man who might well have given up all his world if only to have you even try to go back as you were once, safe with him in a bright new age. My mothering heart knows you take very good care of my lost son. That is enough for me to know, enough to leave me with no questions to ask. The moment I came searching for does not come with question marks.”

Loki chose then to come back, unprepared because he used the back door and did not see the footprints that would have tipped him off to a visitor. When he noticed Frigga sitting on the couch, he bleached so pale even Winter expected him to faint.

“What are you doing here?” Loki snarled, sizzling hot rather than his usual cold, clearly baring his teeth. “Will you not stop until Sif and the Warriors Three and your deceit-laced king have all in turn hunted me down to mock to my face?” She seemed taken aback. Winter interpreted that as a clue, silently flowing to his feet and leaving the room, shutting his bedroom door to give them privacy.

“I did not come to mock. I am here because I have missed you greatly.”

“Don't say it. You're not my mother, and you _lied_ to me as much as he did, as much as anyone ever has. What I have here, in my banishment to the furthest ass end of a primitive Realm, stripped of everything I ever thought I was...what I have here is proving to be enough. There's no room for Asgard in it.”

“Nor need any be made,” she sighed, getting to her feet. “I am content, Loki, to know what you have is enough for you.” _At last, for once, finally_ , neither of them added. Warily, Frigga laid her palm on his cheek and was a little saddened when he no longer leaned into that touch the way he'd done since before he could walk.

And then he felt it, so, so familiar, coursing golden and sparkling bright in his veins even faster than his cold red Jotun blood had been.

“What did you do to me?” he yelped sharply enough to attract Winter back, several knives at the ready, just in time for her answer—and Winter, he was as _quick_ as he was _quiet_.

“Your companion...he is easy for me to see in some ways. He's going to live for a long, long time, Loki. My last gift to you, my son, is enough time to stay with him for all of it.” And then, in a quick blink of light, she was just gone before he could even react to her wording.

Turning to leave the room, Loki blanched when he saw Winter standing there at the closest spot to his room that had line of sight on where Frigga had been sitting. Once again Loki choked on his pride until distracted.

“Well, then. If we've all this time ahead of us, I think it's time you make up your mind about whether you'd rather have me, the world, or a bullet, since it turns out you are the lost prince of two separate Realms but can have nothing of either.”

“What I have here is enough for me,” he repeated himself. “I was born in a world of ice and darkness, so I suppose I should stop being surprised that my destiny is manifest here, where winter takes up most of the year...and I suppose the only man I've met brave enough to _take_ its name for his own should probably know a few things. You may have heard her call me 'son', but she was keeping up the lie for her own comfort or out of habit, I don't actually care which. What I used to be...was a Jotun, a 'frost giant' in some of the old myths here. A runt, doomed to a cold and lonely death as an infant barely born until a warring leader plucked me from the battlefield in hopes of **using** me someday and nothing more. Your damage was done by science and warfare. Mine was done by love and lies. If we both are truly broken relics of times past, at least we can have each other and this place and whatever we decide to become. Why...are you looking at me like that?”

“Just thinking about how much fun it's going to be now that we have the time to learn to fuck _slowly_. I know I stopped biologically aging a while back, but if you're going to be able to keep up with me now rather than dying on me in twenty or forty years or whatever it would have been, I am definitely interested in learning all over again how to take you apart all the ways you like so much. Maybe we'll even find a few new ways. One bit at a time, one little piece after another, with my hands and my mouth and my voice and my cock, and all...just...so... **so**...slowly...”

For the first time since his arrival, Loki fainted.


	17. You Are Not A Tragedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something of an epilogue, which I'd be delighted to see anyone else interested in writing WinterFrost "Weirdos In The Woods" use for a jumping-off point. Winter and Loki will, in this AU at least, live a very long time...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it took me so long to get this chapter up! In the last 3 weeks my family's had to deal with:   
> Replacing a truck transmission   
> Attempting to schedule a time when the truck owner can drive 3 states away to get financing & insurance IF he can find a replacement because now apparently the motor is a time bomb (and the insurance stuff is nightmare-level complicated   
> Getting my stuff together for My People's biggest event of the decade (My People are the local gem & mineral club, and starting the 19th of this month we're hosting the Northwestern Federation show, 6 states' worth of gems, vendors, and other clubs in a town of under 5K)   
> And just to make it even more fun I have to call all over the western third of a large state to try to find an endodontic dental specialist who takes Medicaid. For a difficult root canal--said root is bent where it shouldn't be.
> 
> I think I'm lucky that this kind of drama and difficulty goad me into "stress writing", which is often the most violent and sometimes overall the best work I do.

There came a day when Winter woke abruptly into knowing something was thoroughly, terribly wrong somehow. Ghosting through the house turned up nothing...including in the room where Loki slept when he wanted solitude. That door, almost always shut even when he was not behind it, was hanging open and the room was empty. Winter listened to his every nerve for a long moment, then headed for the hot spring. He knew he'd been right when the wolf growled from behind a bush without showing herself.

“Easy, Moroz.” Her name meant simply Frost, and she was not the first abandoned wolf pup they'd found and raised in their time. She had grown to earn the name, having turned a very strange color when her first puppy coat shed off, a deep grey undercoat setting off the patternless mix of mostly white and some dark guard hairs; when still, she looked like a rime-covered statue. The one thing that never changed with her seasonal sheds from thin summer outer coat to lush for winter was the dark stripe that ran from between her eyes to the start of her nose leather. The name also made a bit of a pun; 'moroz' sounded much like 'morose', and that had been a very good description of Loki's attitude when she'd come into their strange little life. Most such rescued pups had bonded to Winter but left when the pull of the wild got strong enough; Moroz had clung instead to Loki from the moment they'd found her and had been with them nearly a decade. Still grumbling under her breath, she showed herself to tell Winter he could pass without danger.

Loki, fully dressed, was curled into an agonizingly tight ball of soft sobs and straining muscles, half in the water and oblivious to his surroundings like his lover had never seen from him before. When Winter spoke he did not respond, and when Winter tried to touch him he screamed, bringing Moroz at a run. She bristled and showed her teeth, things she had not done since her second year, and Winter took the hint to fade into the forest and leave them be, to let her protect the companion she had chosen for herself in place of a pack, a mate, pups, anything else the taiga offered. Just as Winter had chosen for himself the same companion in place of the whole world.

When he came back to the house two days later, Loki was at least indoors. Tracks in the fresh snow and a soft grumble from the brush had told him Moroz was outside, guarding, patrolling, keeping her pack safe. Most of their wolves rarely or never went in the house, but it wasn't that unusual for Winter to return from other business to find this one curled up asleep with Loki be it in his room, warming his feet for him at the kitchen table, or the pair of them loafing near the fireplace. Now, though, she was much too tense for such comforts.

“You've been out a while,” Loki said flatly from his miserable hunch over a cup of that vicious coffee he so loved. He didn't appear to have eaten or slept since Winter had last seen him.

“Gathering intel.”

“On what?”

“On what happened to you. Why I found you in the spring. Why you screamed so hard when I tried to touch you that if I'd tried again your Frost would have taken either my hand or my life for the trespass.”

“I'm just losing my mind, nothing to worry about,” Loki sighed, despair sunk in his every long line. “If it gets too bad I'll just take a long walk north.” _And never come back,_ he didn't have to add. He knew, by now, that to ask for that bullet they had once spoken of often would be to break a beloved heart because the other man would never recover from pulling the trigger on him after all their time. Not when Winter had finally learned to trust, to take down a few boundaries, and to enjoy quite a few things about being alive at all. And by now neither of them were sure he could pull that trigger unless a much worse death could not be staved off any other way.

“You...have lost much more than your mind,” Winter said slowly, earning a wide-eyed green look. “I went in search of news, and it was not hard to find.”

“What...did you find out?”

“Thor is missing, assumed dead. Odin was killed by Fenrir.” Loki flinched, wondering if his companion knew the history that had survived as odes and legends. Wondering if he knew Fenrir was one of Loki's lost children. “Before whatever fate befell him, Thor slew the World Serpent. I can't pronounce the Norse name.”

“Jormungandr,” Loki rattled off without noticing...another one of his misbegotten offspring.

“Asgard is in ruin. I can only assume that Frigga is among the ashes, as there has been no further word of her. Or Lady Sif, or the Warriors Three, or Heimdall. No one seems to know what happened, only that it was brutally fast and happened at the same time I found you in the spring.” _No doubt the stables were shut, bringing the dead among my true family to three with Sleipnir. Or all, if they were to home. I was never even Asgardian and I am probably all that is left._ “I truly am...sorry...to be the bearer of such news.” Startled, Loki finally looked up, only to find Winter looking away.

“I will be all right,” Loki finally sighed, drawing that pale gaze back to his own. “There was nothing left of Asgard for me a long time ago. My kingdom is here, where winter rules the seasons and the land unchallenged and I am happy with the only man I ever met capable of taking, earning, and keeping its name for himself. There will always be more tragedy, _Zima_.” Hearing the Russian word for his preferred name, Winter barely suppressed a startle. He had thought not even the trickster could continue to surprise him after so very long being so very close. “ **You** are not a tragedy. What we have here is enough, finally, at last, even for me.”


End file.
